Chloë March: Wintering: Snow
Powderkeg records

Five long years separated the release of Chloë March's fifth album Starlings & Crows from this first in a series of Wintering EPs, yet Snow shows that her voice has lost none of its intoxicating quality, and her songwriting and production skills haven't atrophied either. At five songs and fourteen minutes, the release is a compact statement; there's also enough here, however, to remind us once again of March's inimitable vocal and instrumental artistry.

In keeping with the dreamlike character of the music, the songs' lyrics are similarly evocative in their romantic imaginings and allusions. Synthesizer patterns pulsate through the opening “Winter Twin” as March ruminates upon “glittering breadcrumbs of clues” leading back to an unnamed paramour. The rhythms sway seductively and help draw us into the dreamlike picture March paints, the music's glow intensified through vocal multi-tracking and sweeping harp flourishes. The melancholy piano ballad “Under Snow” is starker by comparison but no less effective, especially when its expression of loneliness and sadness is so affecting; if anything, the simplicity of the arrangement brings her voice into sharper relief and allows its unsullied beauty to be appreciated even more.

An aura of magical haziness permeates “Minster Bell,” a quintessential March production that augments enigmatic vocal melodies with music box-like textures and shimmering washes. The spell's sustained in “No Loving Face” when the protagonist's desperate call for a lost daughter's accompanied by the repeating punctuations of a marimba-like instrument. Strip the vocal out and “Wolvy” would qualify as a classic ambient-electronica exercise replete with gauzy textures; with the vocal present, the increasingly propulsive setting becomes an evocation of wild, dog-like carnivores racing through a snowy forest landscape. March's sensual voice wafts through these five pieces like an elegant trail of cigarette smoke, the sultriness of her vocalizing an arresting counterpoint to the oft-synthetic sheen of the backdrops.

February 2026